Google's EMD Algo Update - Early&nbspData

It was initially unclear what “upcoming” meant and whether the change was in progress or would roll out later in the weekend. Matt went on to say that the change “affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree,” but didn’t pin down the timeline. This morning, our new
MozCast "Top-View" metrics showed the following:

We measured a 24-hour drop in EMD influence from 3.58% to 3.21%. This represents a day-over-day change of 10.3%. While the graph only shows the 30-day view, this also marks the lowest measurement of EMD influence on record since we started collecting data in early April.

So, Who Got Hit?

Across our data set of 1000 SERPs, 41 EMDs fell out of the Top 10 (5 new EMDs entered, so the net change was 36 domains). Please note that we can’t prove that a domain lost ranking due to the algorithm change – we can only measure what fell out. Here are 5 examples of domains that lost ranking as of this morning (9/29) – all had previously ranked for at least the past 7 days:

www.bmicalculatormale.com (#4)

www.charterschools.org (#7)

playscrabble.net (#3)

www.purses.org (#3)

www.teethwhitening.com (#4)

The parenthetical value shows the EMDs ranking on 9/28 (the day before the drop). Again, all we know is that these domains fell out of the rankings for their exact-match phrases as of this morning – I’m not making any statements about the quality of the domains as a whole. As you can see, the affected domains cover a range of phrase length and TLDs (including .com’s).

There’s no clear pattern in the size of the drop – some fell out of the top 100 entirely, while others slipped a couple of pages. For example, www.charterschools.org fell from #7 to #23, whereas playscrabble.net dropped from #3 down 18 pages to #183.

What About The #1s?

You may have noticed that none of my example domains were previously ranked in the #1 spot. Across the 41 EMDs that dropped out of the top 10 in our data,
none of them ranked #1 the previous day. Three domains held the #2 spot prior to their fall, including www.mariogamesonline.net, which is no longer in the top 100. It’s interesting to note that, of the 41 EMDs affected, 5 of them had “games” in their domain name, but this could just be a fluke (or a sign of an industry with too many low-value sites).

What’s The Pattern?

It’s not my goal to call these sites out – some may have dropped in ranking due to factors that had nothing to do with this algorithm update (and were only coincidentally EMDs). For example, www.charterschools.org appears to be a legitimate site representing a professional organization: the Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA). At first glance, it appears that their only crime may be choosing a keyword-focused domain over their own brand. The site doesn’t really target the phrase “charter schools” particularly strongly and is tied to one state. It’s not a bad site, but one can argue whether it deserves to rank in the top 10 for a competitive keyword simply because of its domain name.

Other sites in the mix do appear to exhibit more traditional low-quality signals – aggressive keyword usage, low-authority, spammy link-building, etc. – and seem to have been ranking solely by virtue of their EMDs. There’s no one clear signal in play, though – at this point, we have to assume that Google is weighing multiple factors. Again, it is interesting to note that no EMDs previously at #1 were affected, but our data set is still relatively small.

If you have specific questions about the data, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I’ll do my best to follow up. These patterns are surprisingly complex, and I wanted to dig in for a quick first look while the data was still fresh.

What updates? Why updates? What
they want exactly? What they want to say? Still a big questions for me; whether
I carry my career in Internet Marketing (SEO/SEM) or not?

I have seen plenty of updates
from last 2 years (Panda, Penguin and EMD) Mr. Matt can you tell me what you
want to say exactly? Mr. Matt and entire Google team is leading astray to
webmasters and website owners.

They are (Google) always talking
about Quality –

A Quality content, Quality site,
Quality back-link and now EMD (exact match domain) what does all mean? Mr. Matt
please reply me What is quality and how you can measure it? If you have such
parameters (or kind of tools) where you can control these things then please
let me know.

Google and Google team including
Mr. Matt is talking absurd; whenever they update Google algorithms they planned
how to enhance Ad-Words earning by keep down some websites. They know if we
have good online business then we must start Ad-Word campaign besides waiting
for ranking back on SERP and Mr. Matt always talking some nonsense things to
keep himself clean & honest.

I did not know what will be the
future of Internet Marketing and what will be the future of SEO and obviously
what will be the future of Google as well. They are totally flop on his own
products like Orkut, Google wave, Google Buzz, Google Group, Google Alerts and
much more. So, they are only targeting online business holders to force Ad-word
campaigning (PPC & CPC) to earn money only and they have also launched
Google Affiliate program to sell product online and get commission from there
LOL.

But it’s true; SEO is world’s
poorest job due to Google nonsense behavior. But it’s also true that they are
planning to get money, money and money without caring about Google pride and
standard.

Mr. Matt you are not worthy to
work in Google anymore you made Google like shit.

I would love to see end of the
Google, I will be happy to see end of Google Ad-word market and definitely someone
come to destroy monopoly of Google.

Google has hired a fool man named
“Matt Cutts” and I would love to give tight slap on his ugly face.

Why Google restricting on our
choice; if I am going to sell shoes and have taken a domain “cheapshoes” then
what is the problem? It’s all about my choice how I want to lead my business.

My all dear friends avoid the
habit of Google Search Engine and use other search engine to enhance that
popularity. Use Social media as much as possible to get direct traffic, create
business pages on Facebook and more important use Facebook advertise to enhance
Facebook advertise. We have to destroy Google monopoly ASAP to protect our
business.

Why Matt Cutts has taken his own
domain with the name of Mattcutts? Is this not EMD? He must be penalize or
change his domain to foolmattcutts.com, idiotmattcutts.com, or
stupidmattcutts.com.

You are very right!! Matt cutts need some brain as he works in Google as a head of Google's Webspam team, he had just lost his temperament and taken foolish steps against natural rankings. Mr. Larry Page its my free advice to you just hired "New Head for Google's web spam team" Matt cutts become very old version like windows 95.

Promote http://bingiton.com. When most people compare their Google & Bing search results they find they prefer Bing. Plus, Bing has beautiful photography from around the world that greets you every morning. Sometimes my husband and I actually use http://bingiton.com as our search engine because we get double the results and the benefits of two different engines with significantly different algorithms (they didn't used to differ much, but now they do).

With the ranking drops seen by many people I can see three explanations:1. EMD's had a huge advantage which has now been stripped2. EMD's are now actively penalized3. Other significant algo changes have been rolled out at the same time

I
have spent more than six months building an authority site on WordPress
Security based around a checklist (search for "The WordPress Security
Checklist" and you might be lucky enough to find my site).

The site has lots of original quality content. The niche is narrow to make it easier to build authority. There are no ads on the site.

My site was slowly gaining rankings for "wordpress security" and was at 11 - 13 in US.

Now it's gone (1-200+)!

If
you search for "wordpress security checklist" in countries other than
US and UK (where I have links from local blogs to my site) I am
outranked by an article that is far less relevant for the search
(15-Step Checklist To Creating The Perfect WordPress Website). Used to be #1 across the board.

If
you search for "wordpress security" you can now find 100's of old blog
posts of the type "10 best wordpress security plugins" that add very
little value.

In Webmaster Tools it is clear that Google knows my site is about WordPress Security.

The
only link building I have done is by commenting on blogs and forums
adding value to the discussions. And I have had a quality article
published on problogger.net.

I am getting great feedback from the
visitors on the site - although not as many Likes and Tweets as I would
like, but hey do you ever?

Most websites have to look to Google for traffic to some extent.

But how can one build any kind of business relying on something as temperamental as Google has been since Panda was released?

The reality is that Google is killing small businesses.

They say they want to level the playing field and make it easier to rank for people who do not know and do SEO. But the fact is that SEO has never been more complicated and unpredictable. And you simply cannot launch a website without thinking about SEO.

Wow there are a LOT of early speculation and a LOT of angry website owners.Thanks Pete for the first guide looking into this, though its early and small results, we can start chewing on this issue.

As in Penguin, do not jump ship yet. I think there will be some recoveries for quality sites, don't worry.The guys and gals at Google are the smartest in the business, the know whats, going on, they have a plan, they projected this I am sure.

Every one stop bashing Cutts, he did not personally remove your sites sheesh!

Personally, I don't see EMD as something bad. It gives you an overall idea of what the site is all about. Google should not focus on penalizing sites with EMD.

I have one EMD site which has good content and natural backlinks. It is not even a thin site. It has approximately 30,000 words content and is growing. It has survived from the previous Panda and Penguin updates. However, the site was hit badly during this Google EMD algo update.

Hence, my question is should we still work on sites that are getting hit or those sites are officially dead?

They may still be tweaking the algo but it seems one of my EMD micro-sites was unaffected while a branded domain has been. We'll have to sort through more data to see what exactly was the triggering factor.

While EMD isn't bad it's unfortunately what most spammers are using these days so I'm sure Google has noticed this and is trying to combat it.

It's hard to tell after 1 day but I would stay the course and just keep doing what you're doing with quality content.

First off, let me say that it's too early to tell. My hunch, though, is that this isn't a "penalty" in the classical sense. I realize that's little comfort to those who have lost ranking and traffic, but what I mean is that I don't think your entire site has been somehow blacklisted. You've simply lost the advantage of your EMD - and the weaker the site on other ranking factors, the bigger the loss.

However, all other factors - your link profile, your social mentions, your on-page signals, etc. - are still alive and well. This isn't some kind of inescapable action - it's Google turning the volume knob down on one factor (albeit selectively). So, your site has every capacity to do well in the future, but you've got to bring other, stronger ranking factors into play.

To be fair, though, that's just speculation from my limited look at the data and general sense of Google and their broader philosophy.

Am I the only one who thinks that exact match domains are actually helpful and more user friendly? I mean if you're doing a search for "yellow froggy pants" would you be more likely to find what you're looking for and trust a site at yellowfroggypants.com or at tedswoodworkingfarm.com? Honestly, I'd be a little suspicious of a site named tedswoodworkingfarm.com that was talking about "yellow froggy pants" or something that didn't seem at all related to the domain name. Maybe that's just me.

I'm all for penalizing low quality sites, but it's pretty apparent this algo update affected a lot of high quality sites as well just because they were an EMD. The problem is Google can't determine quality content based on the content alone. Instead they have to rely on factors that supposedly "indicate" high quality content like backlinks, social factors, etc. Unfortunately these are super easy to manipulate and until they figure out a way to actually classify good content on the basis of the content alone, there will always be these kinds of problems and good sites getting classified as "low quality" when they really aren't....and low quality sites being considered "good quality" and not getting affected by these updates even though they should be.

For example, do a search for "ddrol". Now look at the #1 site (ddrol.com) and tell me how on earth that site escaped an algorithm aimed at "low quality exact match domains". Shouldn't that be a perfect example of a low quality, exact match domain that has no business being ranked #1...the site has about as little content as you can get. It's basically a bare site.

It's interesting that you mentioned no sites that were ranking #1 seemed to get hit. I know ddrol.com was ranked #1 before the update. Just seems like that type of site would be the poster child for the type of site an algorithm like this should hit.

But obviously good content has never mattered in the past and still doesn't matter now even though Google keeps stressing it over and over again...."focus on quality content"...."we want to reward quality sites that offer a good user experience"......yeah, sure you do. The rankings clearly suggest otherwise.

I agree that there should be hundreds of factors that weighing into the search than just EMD, however I believe that the name of the website should say a little about the company as well.

To reply to your first comment, I want to say the reason why I would not buy "Yellow Pants" at Teds Woodworking Farm is that Ted's business sounds like a farm or construction outfit, not an ecommerce company. I think Google does take domains to a point, they understand that domains are a part of branding but for the most part. "www.YellowPants.com" just sounds spammy and doesn't sound like an authority or legitament brand at all.

Why DDrol was able to escape Google's latest algorithmic change is beyond me?

I just think that exact match domains have a lot of value because they indicate what a site is about (or at least what it should be about). Now I know this isn't just about exact match domains, but about LOW QUALITY exact match domains, but unfortunately what "low quality" and "high quality" actually mean will always be open to debate. I would classify ddrol.com as a low quality exact match domain. Google obviously sees it different because it never gets hit by any of these updates.

If you want to create a site that teaches people how to make a cat tree, I see no problem with registering a domain howtomakeacattree.com. To me that would be extremely helpful and informative because I would expect to find what I was looking for if I went to that site looking for cat tree instructions.

Likewise if the purpose of my website is to sell "yellow pants" then there shouldn't be a penalty if I call my site yellowpants.com. To me that's not spammy. It tells me what to expect when I go to that site. I'd expect to find yellow pants, not car parts or something else.

I just hope that Google is in fact targeting LOW QUALITY EMD's and that legitimate non-spammy EMD's aren't getting lost in the shuffle just because of the domain name they chose.

Google launched new update on Friday
28th September called “EMD” exact match domain. They have taken this
step without giving any prior information, notice or guidelines in his blog or
webmaster.

But those websites has registered
EMD a year before (5year or 10year) they must not be panelized. They must start
panelizing those EMD who start booking from 28th September onwards
because we do not know what Matt or Google will do in future!

Before making big changes in
Google Algorithm, they must release Algorithm update news a year before to acknowledge
webmaster and website owners.

They did whatever they want!

Even they have released new webmaster
guideline (2nd October 2012) after EMD updates! I want to ask from
Matt. Why he produce webmaster guideline after EMD update? Does he want to hide
something from webmasters or website owners? It is a big question!

Okey..! Now I would not be in ranking
if I have taken EMD website, am I right Matt? But I can run Ad-word campaign
for my EMD website; will you please explain me Mr. Matt why I can run Ad-word
for EMD website? Or why I can run Exact Match Keywords in Ad-word?

Huhhh…it’s all about Google
mentality to reduce Organic search and force for Ad-word campaign. Why I would get
ranking on top if I paid high Bid in Ad-word for my EMD website? Mr. Matt you
must reject campaigning for EMD based websites!

Well, my dear webmaster now Google
is getting cheaper day by day! I think we have to move on Yahoo, Bing searches to
popularize that.

After this happening I will focus
more over Yahoo and Bing, will submit my sitemap in Bing and will promote accordingly
to Bing even I will run my campaign in Bing and Yahoo only.

Google is not authentic and ethical
anymore..!! 2012 is the end of the Google!!!!

My site was hit HARD this weekend. I fell from #1-#3 for most of my keywords to bottom of the first page (if that) for all my search terms, not just terms related to my domain name (http://www.thefussybabysite.com). I've been running this site for over 5 years, and have never engaged in anything even remotely questionable. VERY frustrating...you work hard to do the right thing (adding unique contently regularly, being active on social media, doing quality guest posts on other blogs), and then poof! All your search engine traffic is gone in one weekend. Would love your thoughts on what I can do about it, if anything...

I think Google just play with us. before some time or year ago Google
have suggested that exact match domain name will get benefits in top
ranking and people were developed their website by choosing keyword
match domain name. Now suddenly Google just take the step against them
and drop down the ranking for website which has exact domain names. Its
mean you will never know when your website will disappear from Google
even you follow up Google guidelines.

I want to know that As of
now which criteria will define that this domain is "low quality exact
match domain"? and how to solve the issues if some one is effected from
this update.

Actually Its very Confusing to conclude. I have two cases here..Case1 : I am not hit, Infact I have an EMD domain with hyphen and its just 3 months old. My rankings are improved now. I wasnt in top 50 for my terms but I am in top 50 Now.Case2: My PMD domain 6 months old got hit it was in top 10 for 60k search term and now its in #30. I can still see few of my competitors EMD domains in top 10. Comparing to them I have good quality . They are of low quality with just 2-3 pages. This is very weird to know. While the update was for low quality emds but my PMD got hit leaving behind my competitors PMD :).Confusing :(

Dr. Pete, Do you track any payday loan keywords for MozCast? I use them a lot to look at algo changes by Google. I watched all weekend and checked this morning too when they said they made an update for EMDs. Page 1 for "payday loans" Is still covered by exact match domains with your typical spammy site design & garbage link profile. In fact, one of the sites that ranks is cloaking. Not even a PDL site unless you load the site with GoogleBot as your user agent.

The UK Payday loans SERP is an absolute mess and has been for a while, with hacked sites and unrelated sites (attacked with huge quantites of spammy links) ranking on Page 1. All for a keyword that is hugely important to many people as turning to a payday loan would indicate a poor financial situation - getting the right advice and support for these people is crucial. I hate to think of how many people have found bad advice and made bad financial decisions as a direct result of these SERPS.

But as you say, the spammers are still getting away with it so I would love to see some in depth analysis on what it is that are seemingly making these sites so bulletproof.

The site that is ranking on page one for PDLs is really something about NeuroFeedback. BUT, if you click on the SERP result, it redirects to an affiliate PDL website. The rest of the results (top 7 at least) are EMDs with a backlink profile from forums and Russian websites. I would love to see some Dr. Pete research into this niche. Why does this stuff still work? It is not directly affecting me, but these tricks are things that didn't work for many years, but all of a sudden produce results.

No - currently, the sample data set is fairly small, so no particular segment has much data. The problem with the payday loan space is that you've got a bunch of people using similar tactics - knock down one questionable site and there are 99 others to take its place. So, things get a little dicey when an algo update comes along.

This is kind of a bummer. I think EMDs should have a larger impact than they do already. I understand that Google is trying to fight webspam, but it seems that Google's "Do no Harm" policy isn't being enforced anymore.

I run a bunch of EMD domains. The ones with good social signals stayed strong. 75% of the ones without social signals took a dive. Not saying social signals saved them, but I think it helped. They all had pretty good content, but the EMD's that dropped I didn't keep as fresh as I should of. -----thats my 2 cents. :)

Google just announced that there was a major Panda update (4.0?) on 9/27, the day before the EMD update hit. Many people have suggested that they had non-EMDs hit - looks like at least two updates were back-to-back, so you may not be seeing the EMD update at work:

This update has been even more aggressive caused more collateral damage then Penguin.I have NO IDEA what has motivated Google and Cutts to do this. I've never wish bad things on Cutts (because most of what he did was justified) but this has caused too much fallout for me to think he even deserves his job. I really hope karma hits him back.

I've got a couple of very high quality sites, including StudentMoney.co.uk, which is a money advice site for students. I was developing it in a white hat way, hoping that producing hundreds of pages of extremely valuable content would help me. I chose the domain for brand purposes only.After the update, the site has been completely penalised. It only has around 10 natural links to the domain anyway, which isn't even chasing a term (no one searches student money). If I'd built the same site on a non-EMD domain then it would be absolutely fine. The content is great, my user metrics show 2+ minutes on site.So how am I meant to go forward, believing the "white hat model" works, when I'm getting a straight penalty for my choice of domain? I've seen another white hat, user-friendly site (pregnancy.co.uk) get destroyed, which has built a very successful social media campaign and gets 50 brand.co.uk type-ins per day.This update has not focused on quality at all. I have a few low quality EMD sites that I haven't updated in over a year that are still ranking no.1. Google's basically realised that EMD domains are a threat to the SEO algorithm and just smashed up the domain industry to increase PPC. They just don't care about the collateral damage of destroying hard working webmasters. They'll take the extra money any day jut for the engineers to get their bonuses.PS. The ONLY explanation I can imagine (considering this blatantly isn't based on quality) is they've developed an algo for a relationship between the keyword domain and then the frequency of that keyword on the page and whether it looks like you've tried to optimise yourself for it. I have other theories (e.g. domain renewal age, website age and links, website trust and outgoing links) however I've found a number of exceptions in each case.

I'm not going to claim that Google makes no mistakes - the nature of algorithmic changes is that there are always false alarms. However, if you only had about 10 natural links, I suspect your site was ranking almost entirely based on the EMD.

I don't think this is a "penalty" in the way Google usually means it. I think they targeted sites that were ranking solely on domain keywords and may have been weak on other measures. Your content helps, but it takes more than content. The good news, while I know it's limited consolation, is that if you build up your link profile, social mentions, etc., I suspect your site has every opportunity to rank again. You've lost an advantage, but the site hasn't been blacklisted or prevented from ranking on other signals (at least, that's what I strongly suspect).

Also note that more content isn't necessarily good. With a weak link profile, hundreds of pages could actually dilute your ranking ability. There's just not enough love to go around, so to speak. Sometimes, it's better to really target your resources, get people to those, and build something small but effective.

The problem is Google can't determine "quality content" on the basis of the content alone. Instead they have to use all the other ranking factors like backlinks, social metrics, etc. and then make a judgement call on whether they think the site is high quality. (e.g. well, it has good backlinks and seems to have a lot of social interaction so it's probably a good quality site).

When Google talks about quality content, they don't really mean quality content. What they mean, is "We want to see natural looking ranking factors pointing at your website because we can't actually tell if the content on your website is any good using an algorithm. We just have to ASSUME it is if you have the right ranking factors going for you."

The problem with not being able to determine quality based on the content alone is that you end up with a lot of "false readings" that go both ways. Why? Because all those things like backlinks, social interaction, etc. can easily be manipulated.

So you can have a ton of high quality content, but if Google doesn't see backlinks and social metrics pointing at your site, then it says, "This site must be crap." Pretty sure Matt Cutts talked recently about wanting to reward quality sites that "don't do any SEO at all", but then they come back and penalize an EMD that could have quality content, but not enough backlinks, social factors, or other things pointing at it. (So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.)

By the same token, you can have a total junk site with virtually no content, but that has all the right backlinks and social factors and so Google then ASSUMES it's a "high quality site" and lets it keep its rankings (e.g. ddrol.com).

My questions is this, "If a ranking factor can be manipulated, then is it really a good ranking factor at all?" I'd say no.

Probably not, but good quality content is a lot harder to manipulate than backlinks, social factors, etc. If you have good content, you have good content. If you have 1,000 backlinks, that doesn't mean that 1,000 people thought your content was good enough that they wanted to backlink to it. Nor does having 1,000 likes or social shares mean that 1,000 people actually thought your content was good enough they wanted to share it. In an ideal world, those would be great indicators, but those things are super easy to manipulate.

I just think it's impossible for an algorithm to "read" through a piece of content and determine that it's "good, valuable, and of high quality" so the only option is to rely on outside factors that can act as "indicators" of quality. There isn't a good solution. That's just the way it is and the way SEO works, but I also think that means actual "content" on a page probably loses out to other factors.

It also comes down to what "quality" really means which is completely open to debate.

This is rubbish.I wasn't chasing the keywords "student money" - no one even searches for that. I chose the domain for BRAND purposes only and all of my traffic was through long tails and well researched/written content, i.e. white hat.My long tails have now plummeted and it has nothing to do with relying on an EMD (that term brings no traffic).Also your argument that more content dilutes the domain makes no sense at all. The whole point of white hat SEO is to product content that attracts natural links. Now you're saying I should avoid producing more content?At the end of the day it takes time for white hat sites to get natural links. Penalising sites just because of the choice of domain they use (regardless of quality) is going to make any white hat campaign impossible. Investing.co.uk is another great example. I only had around 2 natural links to the site, with 130 pages of 1k+ word content written by a certified financial advisor and now it's been penalised completely. My articles literally don't appear in Google search anymore. Yes this site in particular doesn't look amazing (the design is a work in progress) but the content is fantastic and again has an average of 2.20 mins on site with 30% bounce.I don't care about ranking for the EMD query - it's for brand purposes and receives hardly any exacts. It's destroying long tails for content used in a white hat SEO strategy that annoys me. Google is just a massive hypocrite because they're now destroying high quality white hat sites just because of the choice of domain used.

Content is a trade-off, and this is something to many people oversimplify in SEO. Yes, good content can attract links and help improve the authority of your site. If you're consistently putting out content that's unique and valuable AND attracts new links (from new domains) and social mentions, that's great. Keep doing it.

However, merely having more content isn't necessarily good. The more pages you have indexed, the less share of your internal link "juice" (i.e. authority) each page gets. That's just a fact of SEO life. A home-page with 10 internal links passes a lot more PR to each link than a home-page with 200 internal links. So, it's a balancing act, especially for a new site working to build authority. Build too much content too quickly and you can actually harm your SEO, especially if that content is seen as "thin" by Google.

My concern is that you mentioned having about 10 natural links. The reality is that that just doesn't support much content. IMO, you'd be better off taking some of the content you've already built and promoting it more (social channels, etc.) - get links to what you already have instead of spinning out more content.

Look at it this way - what if you kept producing TV commercials, but they never got aired. They could be great commercials, but ultimately it would just cost you money. At some point you have to get those commercials on the air. The irony of content marketing is that you have to market the content - otherwise, it's just sitting in the ether doing nothing. I realize that can be frustrating, but you'll get a lot more traction if you hit both sides of the equation (content and link-building) rather than push one too hard.

Eugh you're completely missing the point.Whether or not I have 10 natural links is irrelevant. My rankings and long tail content has been completely wiped out the day after the EMD update. You need to stop assuming Google is perfect for a second and listen to what so many webmasters are complaining about - Google has been penalising all kinds of white hat, user-friendly sites. Just look at Pregnancy.co.uk for a start (20k+ organic FB likes).Telling me I should reduce the content on my site, as a fix for a penalty, isn't even relevant yet alone constructive.The white hat SEO strategy is to build as much high quality content as possible, so that it increases your chances of getting linked to - just read Google's guidelines if you don't believe me. No where does it say "we limit your rankings if you don't have enough links, therefore make sure you start small and focus on getting only a few articles out there".Furthermore, many sites ARE in fact ranking highly without any links. Updates such as Panda have made it much easier for sites with little links to rank content. The idea that you just need links to in order to rank became outdated in 2011. Just read about Panda - "we promote high quality sites in the search results". It has nothing to do with links, good content = ranks better, and that's the way forward.Also please don't call my content "thin". It's on average 800 words.I've been many of your comments from this post and like all SEO bloggers you've kept trying to provide the same rational explanation for injury hit webmasters - "From my perspective it seems that you are not penalised, but any advantages from the keywords in your domain have been lost".Please note that this would ONLY ever explain a homepage keyword-query ranking loss. It does not explain the complete loss of long tail traffic from hundreds, if not thousands of posts on a site.Take a look at this post for a better explanation where you can see white hat, high quality sites (some of them are not even EMDs) getting penalised:http://www.inbound.co.uk/blog/googles-collateral-updateFrom what I've seen so far, this update has targeted many high quality sites on non-EMDs. Therefore your logical explanation for ranking losses do not make sense. It also drives me insane how much of a liar and how uncommunicative Matt Cutts is. I think if Search was properly regulated he should be in jailConsider his remarks about EMDs in a Youtube video dating 2011 "We're thinking of turning the knob down a little on EMDs".How does this equate to a full-site penalty for sites with EMDs? Google has been promoting all kinds of facetious G+ hangouts in the last few months from their Google homepage. Yet when Cutts talks about wanting to be more trasparent with webmasters he has the perfect communication platform to speak to webmasters, apologise for any underdeservedly hit sites, and tell us he's working on it, yet he doesn't.

I've worked with clients in search for almost 15 years and have seen businesses and even lives destroyed by algorithm updates. I've spent the better part of the past year building systems to help spot and explain algorithm updates and provide transparency Google doesn't (and which Google isn't terribly happy about). I'm not rationalizing Google's choices - I'm trying to help people understand reality and what to do about it. You can hate Matt all day long, but it won't help you move forward or save your business (and, frankly, Matt is one person at a huge company).

Keep in mind that your idea of "thin" or mine isn't the same as Google's, and word length has little or nothing to do with it. Often, it's an issue of internal duplication, keyword cannibalization and other factors. I 100% guarantee that content volume can harm rankings, because I've seen what happens when a site with problems controls their crawl and indexation. I've had clients as much as triple their organic traffic by reducing indexed content. Your 10 links is completely relevant - not to me personally or even to Quality in the broad sense, but to Google's gauge of what should and shouldn't rank. You can be angry about that if you like, but understanding how they think is the first step to recovering your business.

It's also important to remember that just because your traffic fell on the same day as the EMD update doesn't necessarily mean that that's the only thing going on. Google makes over 500 updates/year, and Matt confirmed he knew of at least one other change in play that weekend. Plus, there's always the chance of site-specific penalties, etc. Again, you have every right to be angry, but it's not going to get you anywhere. Dig in and try to figure out what's happening here, because that's your only chance to recover.

Is it possible brands that contain a keyword could have been negatively affected too - even though in no way they are EMDs?

A few of the comments above allude to this. I have a site that contains a relevant keyword and it dropped a lot since Friday. It's been steadily improving for months ..now this. Some of the entry keywords also contain the keyword found in the brand - they were negatively affected.

If this latest update IS to blame it's a complete outrage. Having a brand that includes a word that actually describes what the site is about is punishable now? ...WTF!?

One of my clients brand is Active Sports Bras. This previously ranked 5th for the key term "Sports Bras" but immediately after the update slipped down to page 7. It has since recovered back to the bottom of the first page.

Could this be Google amending the algorithm?

In the months building up to this it had days when it would bounce between the 1st page and 7th page, I believe this was Google preparing to roll out the update, did any 1 else notice this?

So affirming to check rankings and find that the three exact match domains I have worked on over the past couple of years have moved UP to positions #1 and #2 with this algo change. One actually moved from #13 to #1, no longer out-ranked by sites with virtually no content and thousands of spammy links.

Tenuous as it is to draw any real conclusion from the SERPs, I'm going to spend the rest of the weekend believing this is an acknowledgement that the content I developed is actually not too bad.

Will be really nice to see those clients finally getting some benefit from their commitment to building something good and helpful.

I've got a few handfuls of EMDs and from what I'm seeing in my data is that they were overcome by big brands like Trip Advisor. The EMDs that I had that were ranking good were in positions #1 and the other one in the same niche #2 - now they both dropped two spots to Trip Advisor.

I tell you...competing against TA when you know damn well they aren't performing any SEO for these obscure keyword phrases for Costa Rica, is a real nightmare. They are simply a formidable brand and we all know at this point how much Google favors the brands.

That being said...my non-EMD domains shot through the roof with this update making this update an overall benefit to me and my clients.

I'd like to thank Google for slapping the only site I have left actually earning me an income. I put 12+ hours a day into creating good content and building high authority backlinks etc. It's a completely legitimate whitehat site with a SEOMoz domain authority higher than most of its competition and just because it's an EMD it got moved from #3 to page 100+. Time for a new career.

Now! after this crazy update from Google, we can say nothing is constant in Google Organic Search Result. Anybody let me know that SEO is on now RISK?. Since year ago Google state in their updates that Exact Match Domains (EMD) will have benefits in some way due to their exact relevancy of key phrase, now this time Google screw up every one brain with this update. Is Google still on their word which they stated in their Guidelines? We think its just matter of their money not the satisfaction of organic users result. They just clear with this update, if you wan rank in search then GO WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS.Any one can tell me now which exact domain name selection guidelines after this update?

Interesting turn of events...72 hours after the EMD took down a few sites, they all returned to their rightful #1 positions. Now its important to note that these sites are not bogus sites - in fact they all offer valuable relevant information on their respective subjects. Still however TA is ranking strongly at #2 reminding me that I am one update away from big brand leap frogging me to that precious #1 spot.Another interesting turn of events is my SEO stalker...Almost a year ago now I somehow irritated a well-known (for stalking nothing else) irritable "SEO" for which he then proceeded to execute negative SEO against my sites and also even went as far as to register EMD TLDs to target me further despite being not at all interested in the subject (8 countries between us both). I guess it was all out of spite after I investigated him further I found he's known around the scene as a bit of an arrogant SEO bully that gets off on stalking and harassing other SEOs. Too much time on his hands without any clients to speak of I guess.None the less...wow did I get off there...this guy's EMD domains were knocked out of the park by this update and whereas he went in the sewer my non-EMD pages for those terms shot to the top. Then again his dirty tactics of 301 redirects and forum spam links were bound to catch up with him.Which reminds me - I'd love the opinions of my peers here on this...The post that got this guys goat was one where I said that although for the most part PR is meaningless, there is no doubt (in my mind) that PR factors in to the consideration of the link value from that site. For example if you have a PR0 site and a PR5 site on the same subject, the PR5 site is likely to hold more link value. Now its important to know that I don't shop links on PR alone - I accept and realize its a dead measurement as per Google themselves when they removed it from GWT. However...in my experience (which is quite extensive) I've seen this measurement influence the value of a link.And the funniest thing here was this...amidst this fiasco with the SEO stalker, he inadvertently proved my point when he couldn't compete with the new EMD/TLD domains he bought he resorted to 301 redirecting his PR5/4 pages to help them rank quicker. Now am I out to lunch here or does that not prove my point exactly? Call me crazy but I'd love to hear it. In fact still to this day the 301s are in place however with these recent updates by Google, even those aren't going to beat quality content with social signals to support their authenticity and relevance. So I conclude that engaging quality content will always prevail over black-hat SEO methods of spammy links, negative SEO and shady 301s.

I'm
still seeing "city + key phrase" domains ranking #1 BUT they are good
sites that likely deserve to rank. And it sounds like this algo tweak is
targeted toward low end EMDs that don't have much going for them but
spammy content.

So is anyone seeing any direct impact on local EMDs with city in them?

Hi,just like to join in this thread and say that a lot of my local house removals sites have dropped from page one from 30/Sept.I thought that though they were small sites (not very pretty!), they had good relevant content that users would appreciate and were providing lots of leads.The EMD'S such as www.cheapremovalsoldham.co.uk, salford, bury etc. have all dropped back several pages for search terms such as: removals oldham, removals salford etc.These are sites that I built last year and got them ranking to top spots google 1st page and rented out to clients.I had interlinked these sites and admittedly used a lot of exact match anchor internal linking which up until 30/Sept. had worked well.Just wondering how to recover from this now and keep my clients happy!My more generic domain - www.removals-manandvan.co.uk - homepage started dropping a few pages in Google after Penguin, though sub pages optimised for local towns i.e removals-manandvan.co.uk/removals-rochdale bolton, bury, salford etc remained at top of 1st page's up to 30/Sept. but have since vanished!Any advice would be very much appreciated.Also if any knowledgeable person might like to advise on a remedy, I could start to implement and post results here or is it too early and I should wait and see if they bounce back in a while?

yes, mine's a site with original content, but a city + keyword domain, and was hit bad. There are no "spam indicaters" in the (.com) domain, no slashes or adjectives. There are no dubious link-building at work either.

I work on about 100 domains for various clients (approx 30 of them EMD) and only one site got nailed by this update.

FullSpike.com (Traffic dropped by 70% - 80%)

What strikes me as odd about this, is we do absolutely NO link building on this site, and it's not EMD. Content is 100% original research. We do our own in-house writing, photography (everything). We are like a private ant farm with our domains. I've been doing SEO before Google existed and since taking over this domain we have been squeaky clean.

I also noticed my former client ATT.com, and it's competitors (Verizon and T-Mobile) no longer rank for "cell phones". Amazon, Wirefly and Walmart have now taken over #1 - #3 positions.

I am happy with the EMD update because if we notice the Google SERP before this update there were a lot of creepy stuff on top 5 that you should not be there because of the fake information and low quality guides.

In theory I really agree with this update, because I hate the scramble for the best domain name when creating a site. But the effect of this update has been very hit-and-miss. In my case, it's a big hit on one of my sites, but not much impact on others. But the one it hit is one of my better quality sites (traveltipsthailand.com), so I don't understand why.

Google organic traffic down over 80% in the past 3 days. This is not a site that attracts much Google traffic from domain keywords or has ever ranked really well for its domain keywords - very competitive space. So I did not expect to see this kind of impact.

In looking at what ranks on page 1 for the keywords in my domain URL, I still see so-called travel sites that are just hotel affiliate promo sites, including one which is PR zero (mine was PR1). I still see lots of sites with the same set of keywords in their domain name (I am searching on the three domain keywords), so why is Google hitting me?

If I search for "Thailand travel tips", the site on top of page one of results is "thailandtraveltips.net" which has almost no content at all and was only recently created. I see that the Australian Government "Smart Traveller" site has dropped one place, Lonely Planet has dropped 4 places, World Nomads is down 16 places, Wikitravel's Thialand page is now on Page 6, but a crappy site like "thrillingheroics.com" has jumped up 7 places. How does this work? Why is it beneficial?

Should I now break my broad country travel site up into 5-10 location/goal specific mini-sites? It's a much worse user experience, but maybe I'll get better SEO results? Just not sure where to go from here. I also don't rely much on backlinks.

For the record, I lost a site that was an emd at #1. Unfortunately it lost ranking for ALL keywords it was ranked for, which included about 9 or 10 other keywords on the first page. And of course only one of them was an EMD. All white hat, too. I'm waiting for things to balance out a bit at this point because generally speaking, new results are terrible. Have a feeling we're still in a testing phase for this update.

yep I have a EMD that is actually my own designed real physical product branded name the url is over 5yrs old. all orginal content, videos etc. white hat backlinks I got hit for 5 kws and finally in the last few weeks the kw that matched my domain. Im still king in Bing and Yahoo...however Google searchers are only seeing big boxs like amazon, ebay, target, wallmart which btw are selling "as seen on TV" scam products for this particular market "car scratch remover" Google is quietly manipulating search results for the masses to their gain.=>try this its awesome http://www.bingiton.com/ tweet it to everyone you know spread the word revolution is in the air (matt cutts must go - sloppy lazy engineering of the algo).

I spent YEARS of work and $thousands, painstakingly creating the best quality sites in existence on a subject, now not even in the top #200 for ANY of their keywords, not just the domain name KW was affected. I'm not joking. THE best quality content in existence on several subjects. Professional, groundbreaking research.By far the most idiotic update ever. Google doesn't give a rat's ass about quality content. This update seems to demonstrate that they have a vested interest in keeping it OUT of the results, not in them! Think about it, the worse the organic results are, the more people click the ads...

I have lots of web sites EMD.i have 20.000+ wallpapers unique. i designed!i have 3 editors in my office.after 28th there is more than %90s traffic lost.All sites are unique wallpapers and lots of backlinked sites.Please explain the "exact-match" matt cutts..

What would be really interesting would be to align the EMD's hit and not hit against the search volume for the keyword they target.

Every domain name is an EMD for a keyword in a sense - i.e how would Google algorithmically penalise a poor quality site at the domain cheapbluewidgets.com but not an equally poor site that uses a made up word as a 'brand' name.

It would be interesting to see if there is a certain threshold of searches that has to be crossed before Google applies their filter? Any thoughts on this Dr Pete?

Unfortunately, I think this is like a volume knob - Google just turned it down in certain cases. The good news is that Is suspect the sites haven't been permanently penalized. The bad news is that you can't turn that EMD volume knob back up - only Google has access to it. If there's some combination of factors that make your EMD look less valuable, then addressing those could help put it back into action, but those are probably traditional SEO signals. In other words, build links, brand signals, etc., and your EMD might regain some of its power. Obviously, though, that's a long road and just good SEO in general. I don't think there's any trick to getting Google to reverse this (unless they just tweak the algorithm on their own).

I will warn, to commenters in general - Google may tweak the EMD influence, but they've never rolled back a major update, that I'm aware of. People have been a lot angrier than this, but Panda, Penguin, Florida, etc. still stand.

Its quite agreeable that google does not reverse the actions it undertakes.but this one is highly illogical...coz its quite obvious that if i am selling dress up games, i will love to have a domain name including the words 'dress up games",,this in no way means that the content n my site is not quality content. my 4 sites have been completely wiped out, though they were in top#10 since months. We had huge traffic. This obviously means that people know what they want. If there was traffic on my site, it was because i had quality content and I was offering what people want.

Most important......it was stated an year back in google guidelines that domains with exact matching keywords will be given preference. keeping this in mind, GOOGLE SHOULD NOT REVERSE BACK ON ITS VERDICT"...this can be rightly termed as misleading.........

The ones (or most of them) that used to take a lot of advantages from the use of EMD got devaluated but not penalized. If you start a new EMD domain right now you will be on the same line with every other new domain (if all other things are equal) - no advantage from the use of EMD.This dosen't mean anyone should stay away from using EMD - it could be still ok for CTR and so on - it just that it won't matter (at least not that much) as a ranking signal.Just my opinion.

I agree Career Help. Not that I'd have an EMD just because I think it is huge, but I don't see where all the value was wiped out on it. I think when combined with other signals, Google has made a mod that lowers some a bit.

How can you say that algo effects 0.6 %?
And lots of people gave billions of $ for domain quality EMD,
If you remove this algo why do you allow developing this market?
I have lots of web sites EMD and after 28th there is more than %80s traffic lost.
How can you say that they are low quality "exact-match"?
These sites are with unique contents, old, and lots of backlinked sites.

Is there any idea for these websites owners?

I am going to give you some more data,

My emd's sites which is on rank#1 is in 170s now.in these data they includes pictures in domain name also keyword target is xxx pictures, they are more than 5 years old.

The 0.6% is Google's number, not mine. We don't even know if that means 0.6% of unique queries, query volume, etc.

I'm also not suggesting that every site hit is low quality - with any algorithmic change, there is almost always collateral damage. I'll be honest, though - if you dropped from #1 to the 170s, you need to take a good, hard look at what you're doing. Google is almost definitely seeing some quality issues at play.

If Google really just lowered the volume, so to speak, there's not much you can do, I'm sorry to say. If, however, this is a combination of them looking at EMDs plus other quality factors, you may be able to get your EMD back into good graces by cleaning up your keyword targeting, link profile, etc. At this point, though, it's too early to tell.

This is exactly what happened to me across my network ... garagedoorrepairorangecounty dot com and many more EMD's for major metros like los angeles... this makes no sence ... 5 years of ranking with 6 major sites and "poof" gone... please advise...if you can solve this ...P.S. Dont say rebuild the network as one domain...it doesnt work... pos#1 to #192 over 6 sites.. WTF Matt Cutts ... Burn in hell liar...

I hate to tell you, but I don't think there's a "solution" in most of these cases. Google has really been cracking down on geo-targeting via keyword over the past couple of years, and I suspect that geo domains like this aren't going to recover any time soon. You're going to need to get geo-specific content in play and build each property where possible. You may need to consolidate. That doesn't necessarily mean collapse into one domain, but it may mean shedding your least productive domains and focusing on a few major markets.

I have mixed feelings about this one. While I know and appreciate that the majority of exact match domains were registered just to try and take advantage of any weight given to keywords in domains (and were rubbish sites), there were a few that were legit business names before the fad which have also been punished.

I love the perspective mozcast data gives us (particularly with the benefit of Dr P's analysis). I do though always find myself wishing that the data sets were larger. This is really interesting, but 41 domains in 1000 serps is small. Personally I am hoping that Rand might dipped in to the moz-coffers and beef up Mozcast before too long.

We're actively pursuing an expansion. It's not primarily a money issue right now - my goal has always been to use a carefully controlled keyword sample that's measured precisely. There's a lot of noise in ranking data, and we want to minimize it. We have much more data available via MozScape, but it doesn't meet the parameters I set as we were building MozCast. So, we're working to build a 10K set that's still fairly representative, controlled, and crawled in a precise manner. It's doable, but it's going to take some time.

Could it perhaps be that any ranking benefit gained by the EMD might be lessoned, or lost altogether? If so this would explain why some drops were only small (EMD value dropped, but other ranking factors still in place), and others much more substantial (EMD was the only "good" factor).I know with such a small data set making any judgements is going to be tough, and avoiding the tendencies of drawing links where there are none is easier said than done, but have you noticed any more correlations with the SERP movements? You don't have to name-names, I'm just curious.

With 41 EMDs in affected in the data set, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions beyond the overall drop. You're absolutely correct - this could be a penalty for sites using EMDs badly, or it could simply be a devaluation based on Google lowering the "volume" of EMDs as a ranking signal. I suspect it's more along the lines of the former - a targeted hit for sites with other poor signals, but I can't prove that at this point.

Looking at a larger data sample (5,000 non-branded terms), it seems like the shifts for EMDs and PMDs are quite pronounced, even though the original SERP flux charts don't show a lot of movement. For more info copy+paste the following:

I'm very curious about the keyword "games" being part of the EMD's that got hit in your small sample group.

I have several game sites, all of which have the word games in the domain, but none are a true EMD. That being said, nearly every one of them was hit this past weekend to varying degrees. Some are well aged game sites that got hit by Penguin and partially recovered, while others are new sites I built to replace sites that were hit hard by Penguin.

The one that bothers me most is (HuntingGamesFun.com). I built this site from the ground up to replace one that got smashed by the initial Penguin. It has been ranking very well for over twenty 2-3 word phrases and it had been improving in the SERP's daily. It appeared that I had made a quality site that Google was loving.

With the EMD thing over the weekend, all keyword rankings except one (hunting games) have disappeared. How can it be considered a good quality site one day and garbage the next?

I don't know what I could have possibly done wrong with this site and now I'm as lost as ever trying to figure out where to go from here.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like in Google's effort to get rid of junk sites in the SERP's, so many decent ones are getting caught in the net, and there's nothing that can be done to get them back.

Sorry all of these Google updates to "reduce webspam" have done nothing but ruin too many legit sites in the process.

For one, Google allowed link building methods for years and it became the "standard practice" then they decide they don't like that anymore and kill thousands of small businesses off with one update. Then they do it again (panda & penguin).

Now they decide that EMD are not relevant enough and even more so, they penalize them if they feel they are "low quality".

#1. Nothing is more relevant than an EMD. I want to sell xyz product I buy xyz domain name.

There was a post above where he points out that now sites like Amazon, Walmart, overstock rank higher than actual Cell Phone companies. Seriously?

---

One thing that really bothers me is that low quality links apply a penalty instead of just not passing link juice. This opened the doors to Negative SEO where you can spam blog comments and put your competitors into link farms and you watch them drown.

At least all of my sites that we paid good money for EMD and put hard work into ranking are still doing good in Bing. Now to promote Bing to the world as they now provide more relevant searches than Google.

Decided to censor out all mentions of our EMD keyword in our web copy to avoid Google over-optimisation and to make a point. It appears we actually hardly used the term at all: check it out here - www.usedmac.co.uk (I won't link as I'm scared to now...)

On a more serious note, I think this does have lots to do with link profiles and anchor text etc. An EMD will naturally have more links with that keywords as anchor text. So Google not only boosted them before but also maybe protected them from the panda update more. Now they may have removed the boost, but also the protection meaning lots of domains with narrow link profiles are tumbling.We have hardly any inbound links so not sure why we got smashed, but working hard to resolve it.

I've been saying this for a while now - to go branded vs. EMD...but up until recently, Google has been giving an unfair boost to the EMDs. It would be interesting if we could get a deeper analysis into the quality of the content & links of the sites affected, hopefully SEOMoz has the motivation to do so: would be nice to see if there are other discernible factors at play here.

I saw that some of the results for cheap flights have changed, now cheapflights.com website has been lowered in ranking despite the fact it has good content and millions of pages any tips for the big websites

Thank you for sharing this wonderful insight and your thought about EMDs algorithm penalties. I personally seen same examples as "charterschools" but do you really think it is right to penalize the domain by considering their EMD and avoiding their quality??

I seen one website where the domain name contains exact match two phrase name that coincidentally same as other industry's product (the domain who lost rankings has nothing to do with that authority sites or product). How Google can penalize the domain without checking their content, quality of product and other important factors?

I personally not happy with this updates as there should be some legit reason to penalize the domain rather than just having the EMDs.

I personally think that, the word "low quality" is not considered when they apply EMD penalties otherwise the websites like CharterSchools could not thrown-out from search result.

It is really great to read about the EMD from you Dr. Pete, thanks for giving us updates about the way of Google treating Exact match domains. It is not god practice for us to use exact domain ? In the past i have seen the site it has exact match domain, it was really bad site having lost of technical issues but sill it was 3rd position in Google where other site is perfect and having ethical backlinks. I also see that question in SEOmoz Q&A forum. why that site had good rank? http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-a-terrible-website-ranks-number-1

This is by far the most informative post I have read on EMD update and trust me I have read many. We are facing a problem here after the EMD update which I don't know if has been witnessed by others. From our 50+ sites - few are EMDs and many others have a sort of keyword in their Domain names but not exact match.Barring a few, we have seen a downfall in search queries post 28th sept in 70% of ours sites which include many non-emds also. The pattern for all these sites show the downfall starting 28th onwards.Why are our non emd sites getting affected? Can exact match keyword in the url also be a factor e.g. bestbabybooks.com/pregnancy-books (pregnancy books being the keyword)Please let me know if anyone has any ideas, theories or exact match answers to my query.

Thanks a lot Dr. Pete for the insight and answers.Do you feel if EMD's are developed well with good quality signals, the ones that have been pushed behind will rank and have the keyword advantage in the future?

We have been hit by the EMD update - except we haven't moved at all for the phrase that matches our domain - we are still position 3.However, we have lost all rankings for phrases related to the exact match.

We have very few links and we are quite a new site.I think this definitely points to link quality being part of this update.

We have 2 resorts close to each other in a wildlife destination in India and 2 websites with brand names in keyword and 4 websites with keyword rich domains. Now all 6 domains are out of the rankings even though the brand keyword domain is more than 4 years old and has valid / proper information. Not sure why the brand domain was delisted from the search results.Have to build a brand new website I suppose

The "EMD" update is totally confusing for me; dozens of my sites have been hit with different behavior; some sites' all keywords disappeared from searches, some's few keywords and 3 with exact match keywords are still on same position.Dr. Pete do you not think that this update should only hit the exact match keyword; not the all positioned keywords? one of my site is still on first rank with exact match keyword and all the rest keywords rank have been disappered, is this not confusing?

How do you recover from this? Beef up the content (although based on the comments here, it appears high quality content sites were removed), and request reinclusion? Or just start from scratch with a new website?

I believe that 2 KWs based domain name is good not just to get good rank in Google but it also look genuine and top of all they can develop later with marketing help to brand names as well. This will get you a lot of direct traffic too in addition to the organic traffic.

Question for clarity.... In theory, ar the only EMDs that should be penalized are ones where the website is about a brand, but the domain name is keywords? Like the charter school above?But, if your domain name is something like smallwoodboxes (dot) com, and your company name is actually Small Wood Boxes, then in theory, it wouldn't be penalized??I'm actually specifically wondering because a client of mine's company name is Just Military Loans, and the domain name is justmilitaryloans (dot) come. We haven't seen a major hit, but I"m wondering if it's coming?

It certainly helps if your company name matches the domain name, IMO, but other "brand" signals come into play as well. Over time, I think Google is going to want to see branded links, social mentions, etc. If the site is solid and has some authority built up, your EMD may, theoretically, never get devalued.

I am very much confused about the effectiveness of Google EMD Update, as i got various websites are still in top position because of their exact domain names not because of their quality SEO strategics. I just want to know that how much time Google take to punish all those websites.

Many EMDs are still doing well, and it's important not to overreact. I don't think this is a punishment, so much as a devaluation - Google adjusting the "volume", so to speak. If yours sites are only ranking on their domains and no other attributes, then I think it's important to diversify and start building them up. The EMDs gave you a head start, so make use of it. Just don't rest on that forever, because the rules could change.

Does Matt Cutts have access to your dataset of sites you are using? If he does, then he can easily skew this whole exercise and mislead all of us. Obviously, he can (if he wanted) - let the algo treat your dataset differently than the others. I am not saying he is doing this, just saying that Google is trying to protect their slowly failing algorithm, and will do dark things if they have to.

My silly small EMD I put up for some Amazon commission has been hit. I didn't do any SEO work on it really, but it sat in the top 5 results, outranking Amazon usually. I checked it today just out of interest and the hits ohave reduced by a factor of 5, with it now firmly on the bottom half of the front page.

Looking at GA, it's clear this happened on the 27th of October, when I googled for "google updates", it brought me here which explained why!

So yep, Google have succesfully "penalised" my EMD domain, now, just for kicks I'll play around with On site SEO and see if I can get it ranking up again.

On the other hand, I have an quality aged EMD with tonnes of unique content, and it has not been affected at all.

I am working on a website www.easyreplication.co.uk and my main keywords are "CD Replication" and "DVD replication". The problem is that both keywords are not coming with their respective landing page "www.easyreplication.co.uk/cd-replication/" and "www.easyreplication.co.uk/DVD-Replication".

CD Replication has come up with Home Page and DVD replication has come up withwww.easyreplication.co.uk/cd-replication/ in Google SERPs. And i am working for both keywords with their respective landing pages.

Here are keywords and Landing page:-

CD Replication - www.easyreplication.co.uk/cd-replication/

DVD Replication - www.easyreplication.co.uk/DVD-Replication

I request to the team, please suggest to me, how can i fixed this problem?

Nice to see the biggest UK EMD of them all has not been affected, diy.com is still number one.

For those that don't know B&Q is one of the largest DIY retailers in the UK. Some years ago they decided it would be a good idea to run their website on diy.com instead of bandq.com. A dubious technique to say the least, but if they can survive this EMD update nothing is going to touch them.

kitchencompare.com is another example of an EMD still ranking number 1. This site is heavily promoted on B&Q's own TV ads. They even have a dedicated page for it on their site http://bit.ly/VTO7dm. It's no surprise then that B&Q have the lowest price for everything on that site.

EMD issues aside, I find it hard to believe that a major retailer would try to fool the public with such a feeble attempt at a fake price comparison site, where you can compare prices for red gloss kitchens and cream gloss kitchens. A kitchen is not a Samsung LCD TV, there are quality differences. That's why you can pay £5k or as much as £50k for the same coloured kitchen.

I'm sure they've covered themselves legally by not owning the site, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see what they're doing.

this is something i was not aware, i recently registered a domain onlinequranclassesforkids.com but now exact same keyword is get more popularity. i am worried about it if i can be safe or not ? also please advise me that EMD effect will be only for one keyword (exact match) or other keywords synonymst ?

I've read about the EMD update on a number of SEO forums and yours is by far the best and most explanatory. Because of your great insight, I've decided to join your site and look forward to receiving your top 10 report on a regular basis. Thank you for your outstanding work Dr. Meyers!

I understand the importance of the EMD penalty/credit removal, although I do have a website called Android Advice & Tutorials (http://www.android-advice.com) that got hit with the penalty and was wondering if anyone had thoughts on my loss in traffic? My traffic dropped nearly 70% after the EMD update. Results that were first page are now showing on like page 17 or worse. I understand that having Android in my URL is a factor but do you think i was hit harder because it was a Google patented name or some other factor (any thoughts are appreciated)? Thank you in advance for any response.

Recently, we have launched a new website named http://www.htcmobilephones.in/, but after I started SEO analysis for the website, I came to know that the keywords (HTC Mobile Phones) have been used in the domain name. Would it be affected by EMD update? Fortunately, I didn't start optimizing the website and hold on the SEO process temporarily as the domain seems matching with Google's EMD update. I would be happy if you please clarify on the same.

I have seen that many competitors are using the strategy for buying a lot of EMDs to match their keywords needs, it kinda drives me crazy. They engage with poor content but with a whole linke of different EMDs and are outranking almost everyone on each keyword. Does anyone know where can one report this, or if it should be reported?

In have an EMD that dropped significantly (up to 40 places one day to the next) on basically all rankings. The only "crime"committed on this domain is to have a low social engagement and PR (as there are no resources, thus also none to engage in "clever" link-building). The domain has been used as an experiment to see how far I could get with building good, original content (no copying, no over aggressive keyword use). As a "sole ranking factor" it seems that "content is King" no more.

I come to Moz every day--usually several times per day--and somehow I managed to miss this post. I didn't see it until I got the Moz Top 10 email. Anyway, thanks, Dr. Pete for staying on top of this EMD issue. One of the sites I manage is an EMD that has been #1 in Google for years, but I've been starting to worry about it lately with all these algo tweaks. So, any info you can give us is much appreciated.

I was just telling a friend looking to launch a startup not to worry too much about snatching up all the perfect keyword rich domains, and to focus more on logical/UX friendly branding. Wrote up a beauty of an FB message, too, right before I saw this. Message became: "Uh.. just read this." Great insight here, thanks for the update! Curious to see how it continues to play out.

Personnaly, I'm glad to see EMD getting less prominence. A competitor has used this strategy (lots of keyword rich EMD's) for a while now with the same content on each domain. Sometimes their brand website and EMD website both rank in top 10 for same query.

but how can we check domain name is keyword or not...its a bad update. after a few days each website make a keyword website. my client website (alhajowaisrazaqadri.com) have effected due to this emd update. this website have down on these keywords (owias qadri, owais raza qadri) its a old website 5 year old.please tell me how can i contact with google. all content is unique.

The EMD update effected a couple of my sites. The content on my site was good quality and useful for the visitors. People got what they needed from the site with it having tons of people sharing it on facebook/twitter as well.

there's a huge Google Ad block on the right, and at least for me nowit has a huge green DOWNLOAD button ad for some commercial PDF reader.You have to sign in with your twitter or facebook on the left to actuallypay with a tweet and then get to the download

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but I have also noticed that on the 29th September 2012, a considerable number of None EMDs that have a exact match keyword friendly URL naming structure, have also lost considerable ranking positions on Google.

I have also noticed this. I don't think the EMD update targeted just the domain name. I think it also affected sites that may have used the keyword as the title to their page and also as the linking structure...eg. domain.com/your-keyword-here

I think going forward its going to become more and more important to mix in other words with your titles, link structures, etc. even if this means your URL's will be less "user friendly".

The problem I have is that this sort of structure doesn't necessarily mean "SPAM" or "LOW QUALITY". It can actually make things a lot more informative and useful for the user. But I guess Google plans on trying to figure out the "intent" of every website now.

Hi DerekFollowing further inspection on a considerable number of sites that I manage, it does look like sites that contain keywords in URL naming structures have been hit by this EMD algo update.This has also been the same case for websites that do not contain exact match keywords in the domain name, but just in the page name structure.None of the sites were previously affected by the numerous panda and penguin updates.What a pain :-)

I have an EMD. Dropped from #2 to #3. #1 is Amazon, a slightly relevant competitor took the #2 spot. I haven't changed anything on the site in a few weeks so either the competitor made some major changes or the algo got me.

Following on from Dr Pete's fantastic post HP Group have pulled together some research data charting the impact of the EMD algorithm update across 5000 keywords. I'd recommend reading the post in full but, to summarise, our findings were as follows:

-the average EMD ranking fell from #13.4 down to #26.6-the average PMD ranking fell from #39.7 down to #47.7-the average top10 EMD fell from #3.2 down to #11.9-the average top10 PMD fell from #5.2 down to #12-8% of EMDs that were initially placed in the top 10 dropped out of the top 100 completely (as did 5.7% of PMDs)

The data is well worth a read - http://www.highposition.com/blog/googles-emd-update-the-numbers/

Turn it every which way you want: Google Owns Organic Internet TrafficPeople say "don't rely on one source of traffic" - sure... but with this dominant position you have a very hard time disregarding Google and their organic traffic...

Think of this: Goolge is a private enterprise, which sets its own standards completely without regulation of any kind. Each time they wiggle their tail an unknown number of honest, hard working businesses are wiped out!

SEO's are left guessing what's going on. There is no (or at best very little) transparency from Google's side. What was allowed, practiced and condoned one day is frowned upon and penalized the next day. Years worth of work ruined.

And with SEO's being driven up the wall by Google how can a 'normal' person - let alone a small local business - stand a chance in this game?

A game that is becoming increasingly important for any type of business on or offline.

Home page is currently in position one for the EMD term, but has experienced a ~29% drop in traffic; ~81% drop in impressions; from avg position 8.8 to 9.7; click throughs 115.38% increase (We don't get this one at all.)

I have a lot of clients that have a lot of EMD's in low-level and local markets. Nothing has changed there and they're weathering the storm perfectly.How do people think Google is looking at these sites? Is it purely an extension of the over-optimisation updates they brought out or are they looking at EMD's and then looking at their content, backlinks etc and deciding if these are spammy sites?

Thanks Pete for your first analyze of the EMD update. It seems to affect only US websites at the moment, however I can't imagine to see Google penalizing a quality content website with an EMD, it had been a great advantage for several years and Google never advice to not use EMD by the past.

Justin that is exactly what I believe is happening. Even looking at it from a link building prospective, anchor text that was widely being used for EMQs (exact match queries) for your top kws lead to the big penalties with Penguin. Link building to your brand/url and having a balance of anchor text was a common quality for those who were not as negatively effected.

I got hit hard, again, no affiliate links, no adsense, our domain is our product which I suppose could be consider an EMD but it's abbreviation followed by the a keyword. The site dropped from #2 to #9 back in August and now to #12. Is there anything I can do to help the site recover?

if it's #12 you haven't been hit (IMHO) - tidy up your on page SEO and you should be OK. I'm in an almost identical situation with a site called theskiresortwhereilive.org, which dropped about 8 spots.

A couple of my sites were hit as well but funny enough the sites that are now outranking me are ones with exact match domains, where mine were only a partial match. I know there are more factors involved, but it does have me confused.

My site was hit and I'm a little miffed. I'm working hard on creating high quality content, lots of it in fact, and I'm not building any bad links what so ever. I was ranking for #3-6 in the last few days, mainly because I'm competing with my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts. So if you want a case study or example, mine is a good one. Most of my link building has been done only with social media and a few blog comments on related blogs. The only thing I can guess is that I don't have a lot of links at all, however my site is only a month old. Anyway, you can see the site here: www.ingeniousinternetincome.com

Since it's so new, hard to say: sometimes a fresh site gets ranking highly due to "Query Deserves Freshness," but if you're building social and blog comment links, I think that's more your answer. Blog commenting shouldn't be a mainstay of your linking efforts. Social links don't necessarily weigh in when it comes to ranking highly - so in effect, it sounds like you don't have a strong enough linking profile and to boot, Google demoted the EMD benefit.

Well it was sort of a test to see how things turned out without doing any actual back linking. I didn't want to kill the site by doing something that Google would penalize me later with, so I thought I'd try not doing anything and just putting out great content. Guess it's back to the drawing board.... slowly.

I've seen a lot of situations where a new site got a bit of a grace period, but then rankings dropped after a month or so. Usually, it just means that Google gave the site the benefit of a doubt at first and may have counted things like the EMD more strongly, but then re-evaluated based on the authority (link profile), etc. Odds are, your links, content, and social profiles are still counting in your favor - you've just got to show them positive momentum.

That's a great point and I'll keep working to prove myself to Google. I'm getting decent traffic from other sources, but I would like to start seeing results in Google as well. I ended up with over 1000 visitors in September. I also plan on posting a lot more in the month of October, so hopefully Google will respond in kind. Thanks for the info about the changes.

wohooooo .... I have been wait for this to come through , there are quite a few spammy sites that take over the SERP for some of they keywords I target , this should knock a few of them down. I also feel for webmasters who have legit sites that used EMD's as their domain name who got hit, hopefully they will refine the update over time and these guys can get the results back . <<fingers crossed >>

If Google taking about more quality result and for every update they just give one answer that we have done this change for giving more quality result to users then let me ask to all that just type Google Blog in Google.com and see the result. I got following un relevant links

This change will be interesting if Google follows more because categorize few queries as whether it is brand name or simple keyword is really difficult. Every coin has two sides and yes this has also. Few good people also get punishment. Might be there will more good people will get punishment than the earlier update like Penguin because I have seen so many good website having EMD.

We have a domain which is dwiattorney+city dot com. We were hit. Even though we were really not trying to target this keyword term. Instead we were trying to rank for city + dwi lawyer/attorney. Client is no where to be found within he first 15 pages.I hope they fix this soon, too broad of a change.

I got hit for a EM-D.org (with a hyphen). It went form #8 to nowhere. I had some good links but seems like the update took everything down like the Tsunami. Let's see if it bounces back somewhere on top 100.

Some of my EMD mini sites (5-10 pages) dropped traffic from google, but also a big site (500+ quality and unique pages) was hitted hard, site isnt in englishI dont know what hey mean with "low-quality", but there will be any chance at least 1% to recover ranks for these sies?

i have an insurance based site that im working on and so far it has held up, its in a very competitive arena for a highley competitve keyword, im just wondering if you have a domain www.gamesonline.com but your company name is hmv would this have some sort of negative impact as oposed to www.gamesonline.com with a company name gamesonline.

For our EMD data, we only include keywordphrase.tld (any TLD) - hyphenated domains get put in the PMD bucket. PMDs did take a bit of a hit in the MozCast data, too, but I haven't pulled out hyphenated domains specifically. For the one-day change, I suspect the data set would be too small to tell us much.

thanks, Pete. Another question: do you think it's possible for Google to turn down the dial on EMDs without turning down the dial on the importance of keywords in anchor text?

As you know, one of the big wins of EMDs has always been that anchor text doesn't need to be manipulated - natural linking tends to put the keywords right there in the anchor text.

Assuming there is no manual input here, and it's all an algo tweak, I wonder how Google is managing to isolate the low-quality signals in certain EMDs. What if a big trusted brand were to build a new site with a EMD? It might have very few inbound links and other quality signals, but Google wouldn't want to penalise it.

Good question Mark, I have a couple of PMDs which I'm using branded keyword anchors for link building at the moment - I wonder how the big G is differentiating between Branded keywords and exact match In this instance.

Quite happy about this one, I really dont like overlay matched keywords in a domain, would much rather see the brand name and a proper meta description. Although Ive not seen too many results hurt in my first quick spin around the serps

I am not getting the point in here what Google is trying to do.. I mean I am not against their decision of sacking EMD sites but there are many popular blogs out there like BloggingTips.com, SearchEngineGuide.com, DailySEOTips.com etc. that I follow everyday and each one of them and many more fall into the list of EMD sites list in one way. Now is Google going to sack them as well? And I believe this new algo change hasn't been rolled out becoz if it was then a lot of hue and cry would be heard in the internet industry..

This is definitely targeted - it's not hitting EMDs across the board. They're looking at a combination of signals, I'm 98% sure. Too many brands use EMDs, and that's always been the challenge for Google. EMDs aren't inherently bad - EMD abuse is bad.

What about co-lateral damage? My personal blog with no ads, and 100% my own content, has completely been erased from the SERPS (Including all of my photos) overnight when it was ranking well for a few (some obscure, but important to me) things. As far as I can tell, my transgression is the domain is MY NAME. It had been #1 for my name for about one year, now it is nowhere to be found (and I am looking for a job - great help).

Yes, just "true" exact-match. Our PMD Influence metric looks at hyphenated domains and looser match. That number dropped, too, although it's hard to say how many of those were hyphenated domains. I suspect the data set would be too small to be meaningful.

Ah, you're right, thanks - that sentence is poorly constructed. The "e.g." are actually examples of PMD domains - we match those but then subtract out EMDs for the "PMD Influence" metric. I'll update the description.

Still only 1 days worth of data but seems some niche sites have just been wiped out and replaced with keyword stuffed websites, automated generated content and aggregators which is not really the best quality. The EMD update has certainly pushed far too heavily into just culling domains from the results. The churn and burn websites lost but so did a lot of strong and very relevant niche sites!

I lost my ranking of all keyword of my website; now my all
keywords are out of 100.

It’s true that I have EMD, but I have taken this domain in
1999 since I am ranking well and I have 3 PR for home page, and 2 PR for all
inner pages. My site is good quality
site where I have followed all the Google webmaster guidelines; but now I dropped
my ranking.

But why some website are still ranking well (they all are
EMD based) even they have low page rank as comparison to my website.

My final question is that –

Why those website are still ranking which have EMD? Even they
are low PR as well.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to address that without site specifics. I'd encourage you to post in Q&A here on the site (either public or private, if you want to provide site details). It's hard to speak in generalities. It's entirely possible that your site ran into other trouble, and there are update all the time. In other words, just because a site lost ranking between Friday and Saturday doesn't mean that it was the EMD algorithm update.

Like RepEn, noticed a massive drop in traffic over the past couple of days. My business site, Pixel Productions Inc., has been at the top of SERPS for a wide range of design related terms for several years. Now showing up several pages deep for terms like website design companies (company). I'm hoping this is just a temporary shift.

After wondering were my site went the other day i came across your thread. My site isnt a emd site, it is/was! a classifieds site ranking #2 for a top search term but only had 1 of those words within the domain name. It had good content ,well as much as you can possibly get from classified adverts anyway.

My site had no ads (adsense or other) and no payed links of anykind

So thanks google 7 years of hard work and investment to get were it was and you detroyed my baby overnight..

For the record my domain contained no hyphens

About time google had some real competitors i think and knock them off their high horse.

EMD and all these other animalistic updates (Pandas, Penguins, etc.) is all about Google lowering small business sites to force ad spend. I have 2 non EMD domains that were hit hard. "Minor updates" mean major and it's always more to it than he says.

Thanks for sharing these data and information, Dr. Pete. It may have been mentioned in some of the comments here, but I would be interested to know if we can have a follow up to clearly identify what other factors that directly led to the fall of these sites. Google, with all their efforts to deliver quality for their SERPs, just won't be that direct and with this EMD update we'd of course like to know. Thanks!

HiI have ranked nr 3 for keyword "liberty medical aid". My domain is EMD, libertymedicalaid.com. My target market is South Africa and I host in the US. I have made use of a Bangladesh lady to do manual backlinks to my site. Over the week-end, i have dropped from nr 3 to below 1000?? Could this only be of the EMD update or is there more to this story?If this is not the appropriate place for advice, please direct me to the correct areaMany thanksJP

Interesting data - it was fairly clear they were going to do something about EMD from the talk earlier this year. Really I'm quite glad they are although there will be some pain for me and my clients in the next few months because of it no doubt. For my own selfish reasons I was hoping that a competitor of mine was going to have dropped down from the position 1 he's been keep from me for the last couple of weeks but annoying it's not dropped down at all!.

Libertime, thanks for that, just checked out the top 10 in Google for Payday loans, one site is compromised and one site literally has absolutely nothing relating to Payday loans on it. It's all about the branding now guys, that was on the cards from Penguin, first the target was keyword spammed links, now keyword spammed domains, next will be keyword spammed urls imho!

Since Friday night our EMDs have been dropping from 1st to 3rd. 1st to 7th. 1st to 4th. 2nd to 5th and so on. As of right now about half of 70 sites have been hit. I expect all or almost all to suffer. It seems like it is just taking a few days to roll out. I sure hope it reverses some like other updates. Our levels of quality in backlink profiles vary quite a bit and all seem to be affected.

Hi Pete. This is great, more feedback that Mozcast is useful as an indicator of change for SEOs. I have a few EMD, but they are all location-based matches (local domains). These EMDs didn't seem to get hit at all and one rose a position. I don't remember; do you use any location-based EMDs in your sample? Thanks for the update!

I took a quick look at the playscrabble.net backlink profile. Mostly forum links in totally unrelated forums (plasticsurgeryspot.com/). There site only has 8 pages indexed. They should not have been ranking number three when you're looking for "natural" link building strategy.

We dropped an EMD for the brand name back in Feb this year and it was almost like having a penalty lifted our rankings improved across the board so much. The improvement happened over the weekend (as these things often seem to do) - what a great Monday that was! How would that (if at all) tie into what is happening now?

At the end of the day it's good to hear from Google an answer to those who have been investing a lot of money on content creation, UX design and business strategies rather than those domain sharks who use to take advantage of this notable weakness of Google in allowing crap websites to rank better than their competitors just because of the power of the domain name.I hope someday to see Google also punish the big fishes that dominate their markets for years with extreme link farm, selling links, domain clusters with similar content among other techniques that Google itself condemns, but turns a blind eye.

I'm not seeing any evidence of this in the UK yet. However, I suspect it's too early for non-US roll-outs. Thanks for the early info.For owners of good quality (on-page and off-page) EMDs, it's hard to know what to do. If they have built 100% pure (white hat) sites but happen to have chosen an EMD, what should they do? Is it a case of choose a new domain and 301 the EMD site?

I think this is very bad update...our most of websites has been affected due to this update...I didn't do much link spamming with my domains but don't why the ranking dramatic down... One more thing I noticed that our only .Org domains affected due to this update, so this update also ranking down of .Org domains...Here some of our affected domains: indianluxurytours.org, rajasthantourpackages.org and indiaviajes.org, goatourpackages.co.uk

My 2 cents...I see lots of pros and cons about this update. So, let's begin with good stuffs:

Pros

Google is constantly trying to improve quality of their search results and they are working hard in that way. To be honest, most of EMDs are made for profit, not to provide quality information to the online community. With this type of action Google is trying to "wake up" webmaster to improve the content and add more information about their topics. Thumbs up!

Cons

1. Cases like charterschools.org. This domain seems to be 100% legitimate and not violating any directions. What about other domains like this one?

2. Google Adwords. Many of EMDs are built to provide information about specific product/service and sell same service/product. Impact on EMDs logically mean more money for Adwords advertising, am I right? They say that's just a minor update with low impact, but how many new customers will bring to AdWords? As I said at the beginning, there are many of pros and cons rolling in my head about this update...

Great share! I actually did my own research into this with my own domains and haven't seen that huge of an impact other than increasing in rankings. However, clients of mine that haven't been touching their websites (with EMD's) did see issues after the update.I totally agree with this and think it's a great update on Google's part.

Also I noticed that one of my sites had a dramatic increase in rankings (related to gaming). I don't know if that's because there were a lot of junk sites listed? But I can tell you that I'm getting more traffic than normal from Google.

For every loser, there's one or more winners - if a bunch of sites fell in the gaming space because the industry leans too hard on EMDs, then I wouldn't be surprised if some other sites saw big wins. We typically only see algo updates in terms of the downside, but there are always winners and losers.

Yea I try not to look at the negatives. But I don't rely so much on the search engines. I'm more into social connections, marketing, networking, etc. However SEO is something I put effort into and it does pay off. I guess I prefer #RCS.

Ha, game changing :D You mentioned my niche.And I'd say they like messing with us around Christmas. It makes sense really. They want the REAL companies out there to do well and the leeches that try to trick them to fall off the charts and give up.

I noticed a decline in traffic for one of my EMDs, but it's still ranking #1 (I haven't checked all of its keywords, as the majority come through on the EMD one). Its traffic is usually not as low as this on a weekend and visits were down by almost 50% compared to last Sunday. After further investigation though, it's down to search trends. (I didn't have this site this time last year, so I didn't have my own historical data to go off.) Google's search trends forecasts it to pick up again by April.

Another EMD doesn't even appear in the top 200, has gone to zero traffic, since 28 Sept, although it has been in decline for a while (since about the beginning of September) due to neglect by me. (It was previously about #4 up until August.)

On 27 Sep 2012 i put a new EMD online. After one day i put a contextual link to him into site in the same niche. After 2 days on 29 Sep 2012 my EMD go up in SERPS on page 2 (#12) for 2 keywords. My site is in a very high competitive niche (insurance). The site is custom made, all articles are unique. I think that's happen because of my format page (is like Wikipedia).

Also another EMD from the same niche stay on the first page after update.

Is very sad to see now in SERPS only companies and association.

The BIG problem for G and for other that are behind of G is the information that are released by individuals.

Dr. Pete, Thanks for providing a reality base for all of us. It is such an added value to being a PRO member at SEOmoz. By providing scientifically based data, you decrease the anecdotal chatter and clatter along with the panicked screams of, "Look what Google done to me NOW!" It seems, that when Google makes any change people immediately jump on that as the reason for any movement in the rankings, particularly when the rankings movement is a negative one. Unfortunately, that desire to have an instant answer provides a basis to miss what might really be the cause. When you look at the data you provide here, Google made an adjustment - NOT a change. The adjustment when measured based on its impact at this moment in time as shown in your data, is at best a slight breeze. It does not appear to be the tempest a few on the web are describing. thanks again for the extremely added value.

Google is not a search engine that returns relevant results anymore, its a crap because you will get hit if you make your domain and website brandable :) simply they are killing relevancy.

Good news is that yahoo and bing combined launched their own adsense program for website publishers with the colaboration of Media.Net. So its time to switch to bing and yahoo. you may apply for Bing & Yahoo Adsense program here http://www.media.net/invite#1

I am
totally agree with you evepaq. EMD
were getting extra privilege in Search Engine. From now on this
privilege will be no more. So every domain name will be treated in similar
manner. I hope so. After removing EMD's extra point (for being EMD) many
websites slipped down from previous position. I checked with many keywords and
observe a significant change in number of EMD's in SERP. I am sure Google did
not imposed penalty. If so the sites might not be in 100. The site that lost ranking
may regain its position with effective SEO effort.

I love this update! Too many local service based sites with horrid SEO companies were ranking with just non-legible content and no user value. It does suck for the few sites that did have good content, but I have been waiting for this day for a long time!